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there.</p>

<p>An important part of marketing is to understand who your target audience.
I spend some time thinking about this and by monitoring the likes I’m
getting on my
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/linesuccession/">Facebook page</a> I’ve worked out
that the people most interested in my site seem to be middle-aged
American housewives (I was honestly aiming at British historians, but I
guess you take what you can). Some of the week was spend pondering
how I could extract money from this audience. Would they buy some kind
of merchandise? This is a question I’ll return to this week.</p>

<p>But I do think that a book could be a good idea. I spend some time
considering what that might look like. Eventually, I decided it should
be a coffee-table book with lots of photos. It could contain short
biographies of all people who have appeared in the top twenty of the
line of succession over the last two hundred years, together with
a few essays related to the line of succession. I won’t have time to
write it before the end of the month, but it’s a possible project for
the future. Slightly macarbrely, the best time to promote a book like
this might be when the Queen dies.</p>

<p>I see that my first progress report was
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/eqfdpn/2020_vision_of_dave_cross_line_of_succession/">posted to Reddit</a>
over the weekend. I answered a few questions there and I hope the
discussion was interesting.</p>

<h3 id="week-3-wc-2020-01-20">Week 3: w/c 2020-01-20</h3>

<p>Week three was another week with very little technical work, as I
concentrated on marketing. But the
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/eqfdpn/2020_vision_of_dave_cross_line_of_succession/">Reddit discussion</a>
I mentioned last week included the suggestion that I should credit the photos
that I’m using on the site. That made a lot of sense to me so I spent a
few hours checking the correct attributions and ensuring they appeared
correctly under the photos. I glad I did that, but I’m not entirely happy
with how it looks on the page. If I have some time to spare, I might try
to hide the information unless a user hovers over the photo.</p>

<p>I’m trying to stop myself reaching for Wordpress whenever I want to set up
a new site, so this site is just a static site hosted on Github Pages. That’s
all very well, but I slightly miss all the stuff that Wordpress gives you for
free. For example, there was no web feed for these updates until I hacked one
together last week. And it still doesn’t have the autodiscovery tags in the
HTML headers. Maybe I’ll add them at some point.</p>

<p>The biggest piece of marketing I did was to create
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J51hKn74eyA&amp;t=">a video</a>
that talks people through all of the various things that you can do on the
site. But I havent done a very good job of promoting it. A week later, it’s
had twenty-three views.</p>

<p>A few years ago I set up a Mailchimp account. I registered for the free
level and I mostly used it for the <a href="https://perlhacks.com/">Perl Hacks</a>
mailing list that I’ve been ignoring for far too long. But the free level
allowed you to have as many mailing lists as you wanted as long as your
total number of subscribers was fewer than (I think) 2,000. And I had set
up a few more mailing lists for other projects I had dabbled with. Last
week I revisited that account as I wanted to create
<a href="http://eepurl.com/gQUco5">a new list for Line of Succession</a>. But I found
that the account had been locked because the pricing plans had changed and
the free level could now only use a single mailing list (or “audience”, as
they now describe them). So I’ve subscribed to a paid plan. And I’ve added
a sign-up form to the web site. Most of the marketing material I’ve read
agrees that getting a long list of email addresses should be one of your
prime targets - so I’m trying to do that now.</p>

<p>I did one afternoon of heavy promotion. I emailed a genealogy mailing list
about the site. That got it mentioned in a newsletter and brought about
five hundred visitors to the site. I tweeted to a number of well-known
TV historians - but got no response at all. And I emailed the owners of
a large number of royalty-focussed blogs asking them if they would be
interested in mentioning the site to their readers. I’ve had no response
from any of them either. I guess I need to send a follow-up email this
week. One thing I’m learning is that marketing means you need to be a lot
more persistent than I’m naturally comfortable with.</p>

<p>Oh, and one other little technical thing. I ran a
<a href="https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse">Google Lighthouse</a>
report on the site and it told me that I was using an older version of
jQuery that had a couple of vulnerabilities (version 3.2.1, if you’re
interested). I’ve now upgraded to the most recent version - 3.4.1.</p>

<p>This week is, in theory, all about merchandise. I think the best way to
actually make some money from the site is to sell stuff to people.</p>

<h3 id="week-4-wc-2020-01-27">Week 4: w/c 2020-01-27</h3>

<p>The final week on this project was slightly strange. To be honest, I felt
a bit down. I’m not really sure what I wanted to get out of this month (and
see  the retrospective below for more about that) but I had this vague
disappointment because I hadn’t set the world on fire. But, of course, you
can’t expect to do that in a month. This mild despondency made it very
tempting to retreat back into my comfortable world of coding and just spend
the week writing improvements to the site, but I forced myself not to do
that and to carry on promoting the site.</p>

<p>I mentioned that in the previous week, I had emailed some people who wrote
blogs about the royal family. I got no response from any of those people so
I sent a follow-up email offering to write a guest blog post for them. This
was way outside of my comfort zone as I couldn’t help thinking about the
spammers who email me, offering me various services and then following up
a week later with “did you get my message?” I really didn’t want to come
across like that, so I spend considerable time working on the best way to
phrase the email. I still got no responses.</p>

<p>I also found a few history forums and posted about my site on those. The only
response I got there was a rather snippy reply saying that they didn’t
approve of self-promotion. Their site, their rules, I guess.</p>

<p>Early in the week, I posted a few items to the
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/linesuccession/">Facebook page</a> for the site and
then decided it would be worth spending a bit of money on a Facebook ad. I’ve
done this a few times before and I’d expect to get a couple of hundred clicks
and maybe thirty new likes on the page. But something was different this time.
Over the five days the ad was running, I got hundreds of clicks and the page
likes went from 126 to over 550. I’m not sure why this ad was so successful
(and there’s another item for the retrospective) but I hope to be able to
repeat this success in the future.</p>

<p>But at the end of my last report, I said that the week was supposed to be all